THE SHORT VERSION

Google's No. 1 Gemini 4 Carbon is out — and you can't use it

Satirical cartoon: a giant robot bouncer in a tuxedo holding a clipboard and a lock-pick guards a vault door labeled CARBON, while a small robot labeled DEV and a queue of hopeful people wait behind a velvet rope and a man labeled DEFENDER walks inside. — Machine Age Cartoon · Zimbo

Google announced Gemini 4 Carbon on October 28, calling it its strongest model yet, with state-of-the-art cybersecurity and long-horizon capabilities — built for sustained agentic work like root-causing and patching subtle bugs across large codebases.

It ranks first on Artificial Analysis' Intelligence Index v5.0 at 59, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5, and posts 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym for exploitation, and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching — evaluated without guardrails.

Almost nobody gets it yet: starting this week only a subset of cyber defenders through the Fairwind Program, with developers, businesses and consumers to follow after more guardrail iteration. Introductory pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input 95% off.